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Topic: New container of ice cream for a party? (Read 16427 times)

When DH and I were newly married, we had 2 couples over for dinner and and I made cobbler and bought ice cream to go with it for dessert. I was very annoyed with DH that he had eaten some of the ice cream the night before. I made sure none of the guests were in the kitchen when I was making their dessert plates using "left over" ice cream. DH was highly amused.

Wasn't there a thread a while back about someone serving old frozen leftovers to guests? An extreme example and this is definitely nowhere near that, but it just sort of falls into the same general category. That category being, that when you have guests, you present your best. So buy/cook/serve fresh & new.

Everything new unless your guests are very, very close family/friends.

I had a dilemma based on this a few years ago: we had a group of friends come over once a week to play games. People often brought snacks like chips and dip. Now, normally I'd have no problem sticking dip in the fridge for a week and (assuming it doesn't smell funky when I opened it again) chowing down if I, personally, was hungry - but it felt really weird presenting the same dip when everyone would know it was a week old. Even things like caramel dip, which can keep for months in the fridge with no problems. We ended up usually just eating half-finished stuff ourselves and providing a lot of snacks so nobody would care that half the cheese spread should have still been there

^^A good friend and I realized that we had progressed from friendship to "like family" when we were willing to serve each other food from open containers and admit it was left overs from another event.

I think of it as the same as opening a new bottle of milk if I'm pouring a glass for a guest, or opening a new bottle of ketchup for guests at a BBQ. I can't see any potential benefits that would outweigh the inconvenience of now having two open containers of whatever it is.

I think of it as the same as opening a new bottle of milk if I'm pouring a glass for a guest, or opening a new bottle of ketchup for guests at a BBQ. I can't see any potential benefits that would outweigh the inconvenience of now having two open containers of whatever it is.

You know, you (general) may view me as illogical/irrational but milk and ketchup are not in the same category as, say, ice cream, bread rolls or coffee. To me there is different categories of food/beverages and it feels 'off' to serve certain things unless they're new and unopened.

Perhaps the difference in serving new vs. opened items is whether the item may have been touched by a serving implement, and therefore runs the risk of "contamination"? Milk, ketchup, and salad dressings come straight out of the container onto the food or into the glass. Ice cream pretty much has to be scooped/touched, and to a lesser extent things like chips can be scooped out by hand so it's harder to prove that it hasn't been ... germed up, for lack of a better expression. Butter/spreads are kind of a mixed bag - you need a serving implement but far fewer people are likely to lick the butter knife.

I'm not generally bothered by germs myself - I don't notice things like double-dipping and I have no issues using my hand to get food that other people use their hands on (bowls of chips, nuts, etc). Typical exception to this is seeing small children manhandle items or dig around in a bowl or bag. I won't eat any of it after that. Extraordinary exception was seeing an adult serving slices from a large sheet cake and using fingers and knife to transfer slices to plates, while absently licking her fingers between slices. That was just egregious.

But personally, I'm not comfortable serving or being served anything that smacks of being a remnant, like with less than half-full bottles of salad dressing or mostly empty bags of chips. So for me, it's not whether the ice cream box/tub was new or not-new, it's whether it was fresh, even if partially gone, or not-fresh.

I always serve new ice cream because I have a slightly irrational fear of freezer burn. But for condiments, I don't have any problem using already opened ones. I can't imagine how much ketchup, etc. would be being thrown away if I opened a new one each time. (Although I do agree that for salad dressing I kind of disklike less than 1/2 full bottles. Perhaps not entirely rational. )

So for those of you who open new condiments, would you feel the same if you were putting the condiments into serving dishes? So, if you poured the ketchup into bowls with spoons, etc. whenever you served it, would you still feel like you need to open a new one or is it the already used container that is the issue? I'm genuinely curious, not being snarky at all.

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"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss

I don't like the look of commercial salad dressing bottles or ketchup or mustard bottles on my table. Things like that are decanted into other containers. For a casual picnic, I use the red and yellow squirt type bottles to serve ketchup and mustard. Salad dressings go into one of the many prescut cruets that I own and other things are put into a variety of different dishes/containers depending on the particular item of food.

Now, having said that, I don't care if other people serve salad dressings or ketchup or mustard or anything else that has been opened previously. I really don't pay that much attention to how other people do things at meals.

My family has a strong preference for ice cream cakes for birthdays and so it has been many years since I've been to a birthday party that has separate ice cream. Most of the desserts I make are usually not served with ice cream. Until this post, I hadn't realized how seldom any of us eat ice cream. I actually can't remember the last time I bought any ice cream.

I'll usually buy fresh coffee beans for dinner parties or holidays. My mom would always open a fresh can of coffee so that it would be as fresh as possible.

Oh, when I mentioned coffee I was referring to making a fresh pot as opposed to serving leftover coffee in the coffeemaker. I usually spring for good coffee and keep it tightly wrapped and we use I fairly quickly so I never have old beans laying around and we just started buying green coffee and roasting it ourselves and once the roasted beans are ready, they should be consumed in a week or so. So I wouldn't feel it's 'off' to serve my fresh roasted beans or my backup Starbucks to guests.

To me it's not so much the germ factor as it is the freshness factor. Chips, particularly potato chips but tortilla chips too, start going stale the second you open the bag. Ice cream is not going to go bad quite that fast but it still just doesn't seem fresh. Something like ketchup seems to last forever.

As far as putting the ketchup bottle or salad dressing bottle directly on the table, I agree somewhat. If it's a backyard BBQ, I consider it pretty casual so putting the actual bottle out is ok. If it's a nice sit down dinner at the dining room table, then I'd prefer to use my pretty serving dishes so I'll decant whatever it is before placing it on the table. And I usually make my own salad dressing so the only time I ever set down a store-bought salad dressing bottle on the table is if one of my guests brought the salad and a bottle with it.

I wouldn't think twice about pouring a guest a glass of milk, juice or soda from an open container so long as the milk or juice is fresh and the soda properly fizzy. I wouldn't mind because neither of us drink directly from the bottle.

Since we grind our coffee beans for each pot, I wouldn't necessarily buy a new bag for guests but I wouldn't serve warmed-over coffee to guests.

The little entertaining we do is almost always family or very close friends in a casual setting. No one minds a ketchup or salad dressing bottle on the table.